OLEACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 35 
FRAXINUS PROFUNDA. 
Pumpkin Ash. 
LEaFLEts 7 to 9, lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate, pubescent on the lower surface, 
petiolulate. 
Fraxinus profunda, Bush, Garden and Forest, x. 515 Fraxinus Americana, var. profunda, Bush, Rep. Wis- 
(1897). — Britton, Man. 725. sourt Bot. Gard. v. 147 (1894). 
A tree, sometimes one hundred and twenty feet in height, with a slender trunk occasionally 
three feet in diameter above the much enlarged and buttressed base, and small spreading branches 
which form a narrow and rather open head; or often much smaller.’ The bark of the trunk varies 
from one half to three quarters of an inch in thickness, and is light gray and divided by shallow 
fissures into broad flat or rounded ridges broken on the surface into thin closely appressed scales. The 
branchlets are stout, marked by large pale lenticels, and coated\ when they first appear with hoary 
tomentum ; they are tomentose or pubescent during their first winter, and light gray and pilose or 
glabrous the following year. The large oblong slightly raised leaf-scars are rounded at the base and 
obconic at the apex, which nearly incloses the small ovate obtuse lateral buds. The terminal buds are 
broadly ovate, obtuse, ight reddish brown, and covered with close pale pubescence. The leaves vary 
from nine to eighteen inches in length, with stout tomentose petioles and usually seven but occasionally 
nine long-stalked leaflets ; these are lanceolate or ovate-lanceolate, acuminate or abruptly long-pointed 
at the apex, and rounded or broadly cuneate, and usually unsymmetrical at the base ; when they unfold 
they are coated on the lower surface, like their stalks, with hoary tomentum, and are pilose on the 
upper surface, with short pale hairs, particularly along the midribs and veins, and at maturity they are 
thick and firm in texture, dark yellow-green and nearly glabrous above, soft-pubescent below, from 
five to ten inches long and from two to five inches wide, with stout yellow midribs deeply impressed 
and puberulous above, and numerous slender primary veins arcuate and connected near the margins, 
which are undulate and entire or slightly serrate, with small remote teeth. The staminate and pistillate 
flowers are produced on different trees in elongated much-branched pubescent panicles, with oblong or 
oblong-obovate scarious bracts and bractlets. The staminate flower is composed of a minute cam- 
panulate obscurely four-toothed calyx and two or three stamens, with oblong apiculate anthers and 
comparatively long slender filaments. The calyx of the pistillate flower is large, deeply lobed, accrescent 
and persistent under the fruit, and the ovary is gradually contracted into the slender style which is 
divided into two dark spreading stigmatic lobes. The fruit, which is produced in long drooping 
many-fruited clusters, varies from two and a half to three inches in length; it is oblong, with a 
wing which is often half an inch wide and sometimes faleate, rounded, apiculate or emarginate at the 
apex, and decurrent to below the middle or nearly to the base of the thick terete many-rayed body. 
Fraxinus profunda grows in deep river-swamps often inundated during several months of the 
year in Dunkin and New Madrid counties, southeastern Missouri, in Clay and Lincoln counties in eastern 
Arkansas, and on the lower Appalachicola River in western Florida. 
1 The tree cut by Mr. Bush near Varner, Lincoln County, Arkan- the ground. It was two hundred years old, with eighty-one layers 
sas, to obtain a specimen for the Jesup Collection of North Amer- of sapwood, which was four inches in thickness. 
ican Woods in the American Museum of Natural History, New 2 Fraxinus profunda appears to have been first collected on the 
York, was one hundred and eighteen feet in height, with a trunk Appalachicola River on June 7, 1897, by F. Roth. It was found in 
thirty-three inches in diameter at three feet above the surface of the same locality by B. F. Bush in August of the same year, and 
in March, 1898, by Dr. A. W. Chapman and C. S. Sargent. 
